What does racial (in)justice sound like? On listening, acoustic violence and the booing of Adam Goodes

Abstract

At the height of public debate surrounding the sustained booing of Indigenous AFL footballer Adam Goodes between 2013 and 2015, several media commentators routinely misheard the roar of the crowd as nothing other than acceptable social behaviour. To ears invested in the established order, the distinction between a ‘boo’ and a ‘boo’ is non-existent; to racialized others, like Adam Goodes, hearing the difference – and calling it out – is an act of resistance, sovereignty, and survival. Taking the booing of Adam Goodes as its starting point, this paper argues for a notion of political listening that attends to the sonic and sonorous histories of racial violence without displacing, or indeed replicating, its wounding effects. I consider the entangled relationship between sound, power and violence, moving beyond the sporting field to examine other acoustic territories where struggles for sovereignty, power and racial justice are playing out. By attending to the ways sound is unevenly deployed to target, silence, assimilate or oppress others along racial lines, this paper hopes to unsettle the listening logic and privileged position of the white, settler-colonial ear, to expose the norms of attention that condition and solidify their appearance.